Monday, September 01, 2014

Don't let him close it now for God's sake since it would be a message, plus, soon it will be very full: Decaying Guantánamo Defies Closing Plans - Of the 83 detainees transferred under Mr. Obama, five have participated in terrorist or insurgent activity afterward, and two others are suspected of doing so.

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — One sweltering afternoon last month, a Boeing C-17
military transport plane arrived at the American naval base here. It had come to
take six low-level detainees to new lives in Uruguay after 12 years of
imprisonment.

Although President Obama pledged last year to revive his efforts to close
Guantánamo, his administration has managed to free just one
low-level prisoner
this year, leaving 79 who are approved for transfer to other countries. It has
also not persuaded Congress to lift its ban on moving the remaining 70
higher-level detainees to a prison inside the United States.

More than 12 years after the Bush administration sent the first prisoners here,
tensions are mounting over whether Mr. Obama can close the prison before leaving
office, according to interviews with two dozen administration, congressional and
military officials. A split is emerging between State Department officials, who
appear eager to move toward Mr. Obama’s goal, and some Pentagon officials, who
say they share that ambition but seem warier than their counterparts about
releasing low-level detainees.

Legal pressures are also building as the war in Afghanistan approaches its
official end, and the judiciary grows uncomfortable with the military’s practice
of force-feeding hunger strikers. And military officials here, faced with
decaying infrastructure and aging inmates, are taking steps they say are
necessary to keep Guantánamo operating — but may also help institutionalize it.

Mr. Obama has argued that Guantánamo should be closed because of its high costs,
nearly $3 million per detainee annually, and because it endangers national
security; it has become an anti-American symbol of past torture and other
detainee abuses. Extremists of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, who beheaded
an American reporter in Syria last month, exploited those sentiments by
forcing him to wear orange clothing like the garb worn by some Guantánamo’s
detainees.

By law, the defense secretary has the final say on whether it is safe enough to
release a detainee. Leon E. Panetta, the former defense secretary, approved no
low-level transfers, but his successor, Chuck Hagel, approved
10 by December and another early this year.

Of the 83 detainees transferred under Mr. Obama, five have participated in
terrorist or insurgent activity afterward, and two others are suspected of doing
so, according to the Office
of the Director of National Intelligence. In May, the White House sent Mr.
Hagel a memo saying he should accept more than “zero risk” because allowing the
prison to remain open raised risks, too. But Mr. Hagel told
The Times that he was taking his time.